Suppliers

I slogged through the exceedingly slow process to buy a new domain from [Bad link] over the weekend. I had gotten a good review on them from [Bad link], after all, and they are cheap compared to what I’ve done in the past.

I thought the slowdown was due to problems on my parents’ network, as I was at their home, wireless, on their formerly-Adelphia-now-Time-Warner cable modem connection.

Well, it turns out the slowdowns have persisted since my return home. It’s dreadfully slow to load any of the admin pages to do anything with my new account. Literally every graphic appears with the “missing image” question mark icon in Safari. Almost all of their forms appear to use graphics for buttons … and therefore, it’s nearly impossible for me to figure out how to submit changes.

I have yet to be a good customer and log a support request about this but I’ve tried it in both Safari and Firefox, and from multiple networks that have little in common.

I’m not pleased, and I hope this situation improves. Right now, I regret my purchase with them. Even though it cost much more to purchase a domain from [Bad link], I felt like I’ve gotten a working, reliable system from them.

I just upgraded [Bad link] from version 3 to 3.5, and promptly discovered that it no longer lets me control [Bad link] 2. Only when I tried to using the Clicker application on my [Bad link] 650 to control Keynote did I get a message that Keynote 3.0.2 or later was required.

Needless to say, I have not yet upgraded to Keynote 3. It has been out more than a year, and the rumors peg an update that was aligned with Leopard. Apple offers no upgrade price break; you’re always buying a full copy. It makes little sense to update to the newer version of it in [Bad link] ‘06 now, unless I really want a universal version or compatibility with this new Clicker.

Compatibility that I had, mind you, yesterday on the old version. Sigh. If they’d just put this in the system requirements on the Clicker Web site, I wouldn’t have upgraded.

Update: Salling swiftly responded to my tech support request and suggested using the [Bad link].

I’ll admit it: I’m a bit slow when it comes to the shell. I use it a lot, but never feel like I’m using it as well as I could. But today, I figured out how to turn on Z Shell completion system. And it is very, very good.

[Bad link] helped me, leading me to add the following to my .zshrc file:

autoload -U compinit
compinit

Once I’d done that, I could begin completing various commands and parameters. Within a few moments, using the tutorial above, I’d already completed:

command names

file and directory paths

changing a directory with cd, listing only directories

listing each directory that would be extracted from a tar archive

ssh destination, including user and host

changing to a directory three-levels deep with cd, using only the first letter of each of the three paths (i.e. “/u/l/b” for “/usr/local/bin”).

When scripting for system administration, it’s often helpful to know what edition and version of Mac OS X is installed.

By edition, I mean whether you are using Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server — Server generally being a superset of the client operating system. The version, of course, is an indentifier such as “10.4.9” or “10.3” or “10.2.8.”

Given the version number, you can deduce the marketing name of the system software: “Tiger,” “Panther,” and “Jaguar,” respectively. Interestingly, I’m aware of no string in the system that identifies that marketing name; even “About This Mac” in the Apple menu does not display it. (However, you can find all of the names in the [Bad link].)

You can obtain the version information in a number of ways. From a scriptability standpoint, the quickest way to the chase is probably the sw_vers utility. The basic usage and output looks like this:

… but you can also, as of Mac OS X 10.3 or later, narrow it down to get just the string you want. (Note that you can only run sw_vers, without modification, in Jaguar and earlier.) So, if you just need the ProductVersion, ask for it:

$ sw_vers -productVersion
10.4.9

One drawback of this solution is that you can only get the version information for a running copy of Mac OS X. According to its man page, sw_vers
“prints version information about the Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server operating
system running on the local machine.” It can’t detect the version of a
non-running Mac OS X installation.

Happily, the same information is stored in two property list files in the /System directory. Therefore, you can read the version data directly from these plist files.

… where $volume is the path to the target volume. The ServerVersion.plist file does not exist on workstation/client edition of Mac OS X. The mere presence of the ServerVersion.plist, therefore, indicates that you have encountered Mac OS X Server.

Reading the plists comes in handy if you’re trying to detect the version of Mac OS X on a disk other than the current startup disk, where sw_vers fails. This means you can even detect the version of Mac OS X installed on Apple’s boot CDs and DVDs!

The plist method is also useful if you’re using a scripting language — such as Python, with its [Bad link] (I’m sure there’s something for Perl, too … and you could also try defaults as above) — that can read them. If the files can be read directly, you don’t need to call out to a shell command, even one as simple as sw_vers or defaults, from within the scripting language. That means you won’t be spawning an additional process, and your scripts can therefore gain a slight speed increase.

Update: I did run the same test on a Mac OS X 10.0 install CD from 2001. The results show that you can use the property list reading method to obtain the version information for any release of Mac OS X:

Continuing today’s [Bad link] love, I should mention that I recently figured out how to use the [Bad link]. Thanks to Inline, I’ve gotten much closer to the more-ideal state I felt I had with the built-in facilities of [Bad link] Manila in 1999.

Namely, I adored Manila’s easy interlinking of pages. I could just quote the name of one page while in the body text of a second page, and the quoted title would become a link between them when published. I could also put images inline by quoting their titles in the body text of a page. It made the rapid creation of new, richly-linked sets of pages very fast and, while not effortless, much easier. I’ve used that to good effect, I think, in some past projects.

Drupal’s Inline module allows me to do much the same today. It uses double square brackets, which aren’t as convenient as quotes, but it gives me additional power I always wished Manila had. I can place the titles of pages on my site inside the double backets, to link between pages internally. I can also put the URLs of outside pages in those brackets, to link externally. I can also modify this by putting a pipe between the title or URL, and the link text that I want the reader to see on the page. This is very flexible, and that last ability really overcomes an obstacle I ran into with [Bad link] — without the opportunity to change the link text, I ended up having some oddly-capitalized links within sentences.

I have had the urge to adjust the automatically-generated paths that Drupal’s [Bad link] provides for each story I post. Today, I took a quick look at Pathauto after some brief Web searches on this topic, and found that making changes was remarkably easy.

New articles I post to Irreality will now have a default path that corresponds to the year, month, and day, followed by the article title. Therefore, I can predict that this article will end up being at “/2007/05/03/pathauto_and_custom_paths.”

Thanks to the facilities in Pathauto, I’ve also generated:

supplemental paths for already-existing stories (without replacing their old paths right off the Web root)

index pages for each segment of each path, such as the years, months, and days

news feeds for each new index.

It wasn’t obviously to me how to do all of this upfront, but the power of [Bad link] is really growing on me as I learn more tidbits like this.

This simply means there are no directories in common in sys.path — the list of directories where modules can be installed — between these two versions of Python. I find that a bit annoying, since I can’t by default count on deploying one module to a single location that will work in both the default and upgraded versions of Python.

That lack of a default common location also has an impact if you’re managing the filesystem with [Bad link].

Yesterday, I thought I’d came across a potential solution to a problem I’d been having with restoring disk images to target drives using Disk Utility. I keep getting error 22, “invalid argument,” when restoring images over HTTP, using Disk Utility on the original Tiger version of the Mac OS X Install DVD.

While there could be [Bad link], restoring the same images locally — over FireWire target disk mode, for example — appears to succeed reliably and repeatedly. (See also [Bad link], where the core error was also not resolved.)

Let’s say that you have your images stored on a Web server — preferably one with some access controls, because you don’t want your system images open to just anyone. That should let you use Apple Software Restore’s HTTP-based image restore feature. You have already prepped the images for ASR, creating them appropriately (possibly through the use of shadow files) and applying the volume-level checksum that is required for block-level restores.

However, let’s assume that your naming convention for system images includes more than one period. After all, you’re creating images for Mac OS X versions like 10.3.9 and 10.4.8 … it’s natural to want to use those version numbers somewhere in your system image names. There’s no sense in changing those periods to some other character, right?

Well, I surmised there might have been a reason to change or remove those periods. I expected that removing — or encoding with %2e (as noted in this [Bad link]) — the periods from a test image’s name would have a beneficial effect, to let me restore it successfully via HTTP. However, it was still a no-go with the encoded characters, so I’m now back where I started. The image restoration works until near the end of the process, and I get error 22 again. Grr.

I’m wondering out loud now whether there’s a problem with automount, since I’ve seen some search results that seem to mention error 22 in conjunction with it. I have no clue why it would fail only for HTTP-based ASR restores using a Tiger install DVD, though.

It seems I can recall the restore-via-HTTP feature working at some point in the past, but it certainly hasn’t done so to my recollection under Tiger.

I’d been having problems for several weeks, maybe months, with printing out some kinds of documents from my office MacBook Pro. I’d send the print jobs to our trusty Xerox WorkCentre Pro 55, and I’d get one copy of the document. This was okay when I only wanted one copy. But, I’d increasingly had a need for several … so defaulting to one just made it difficult to get multiple original copies (or “mopies,” I guess, if you subscribe to HP-lingo) when I needed them.

This problem seemed to spread from PDFs in Safari, to all PDFs, and then to other document types — including, most recently, documents printed directly from Microsoft Word 2004. At this point, I became aggravated enough that I tried some very minimal troubleshooting, which quickly led nowhere. I just wanted this to work.

So, I took the shotgun approach. I hate doing this, because I want to know the whys and wherefores of problems. I want to apply the scientific method to finding and resolving the issue at hand. I want to prevent the problem from appearing again. In this case, though, I just needed to print … and I resorted to the “Reset Printing System” menu command in Printer Setup Utility.

I next tried a PDF that had failed to print completely before. I’ve had success with that, as well. Excellent.

Therefore, if you know the definitions for your printers — because the “Reset Printing System” command in Tiger will delete your print queues and force you to re-add them — then the reset option can resolve some strange problems and get you back in working order.